The Space Shuttle serves no needed social benefit, it is murder for the sake of a jobs program, and is the horrible side-effect outcome of super effective public relations by NASA in those programs up to the lunar landings which were genuine scientific explorations. And they were safer!
There were 11 manned Apollo missions, they all brought their crews home alive. A failure rate of 0%. There would have and should have been more Apollo missions,
But socialism won out. The Space Shuttle was a far more effective jobs and contracts program. The Shuttle killed our lunar exploration program. Socialism can't stand competition.
This is a trivial discussion, but what the hell.
Russian Roulette can be played for many reasons, including money. If a man played Russian Roulette for $250,000 so that his wife could get the medical care she desperately needed, would you consider him to be suicidal?
Of course intent matters.
...There were 11 manned Apollo missions, they all brought their crews home alive. A failure rate of 0%. There would have and should have been more Apollo missions...”
Apollo 1 is the official name that was later given to the never-flown Apollo/Saturn 204 (AS-204) mission. Its command module (CM-012) was destroyed by fire during a test and training exercise on January 27, 1967 at Pad 34 (Launch Complex 34, Cape Canaveral, then known as Cape Kennedy) atop a Saturn IB rocket. The crew aboard were the astronauts selected for the first manned Apollo program mission: Command Pilot Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee. All three died in the fire.
Although the ignition source of the fire was never conclusively identified, the astronauts’ deaths were attributed to a wide range of lethal design hazards in the early Apollo command module. Among these were the use of a high-pressure 100 percent-oxygen atmosphere for the test, wiring and plumbing flaws, inflammable materials in the cockpit (such as Velcro), an inward-opening hatch that would not open in this kind of an emergency and the flight suits worn by the astronauts.